Firefox 8 arrives today to leave unwanted add-ons out

Mozilla is releasing a major update for Firefox (Firefox 8) today, so let’s give a look at what we are getting in this release cycle.

Some releases ago, Firefox introduced a feature so that when you are restoring a previous Firefox session, the current tab is loaded first while the others are loaded afterwards in the background or as soon as you switch to another. If this is not the behavior you want, there is now an option in the Options (Preferences) window, to load all tabs at once as before.

Twitter is now a featured search plugin

Most importantly, Firefox is more restrictive and will alert you about silently installed add-ons. As you may have encountered, some extensions may just appear (think toolbars) either as part of a virus infection or as bundles from some installed software. In any case, when the extension wasn’t installed through Firefox user interfaces, it will show a warning and give you the option to accept or reject the extension.

On the developer front, two interesting additiona among several: support for hyphenation as part of CSS3, though it is still experimental; and site served context menu items. Now an HTML element in a web page can define additional items for that element context menu. In the example below, some actions have been added for an image as more context menu items and sub menu.